EACR 2016

Obesity promotes pancreatic cancer progression and resistance

Dr Joao Incio - Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, USA

We talked a little bit about the work we’ve done on the impact of obesity on cancer, so basically how it is that adipose tissue promotes tumour progression. What we found was that there are many ways but one of them is through inflammation. So adipose tissue generates a lot of inflammation that then promotes tumour progression and this tumour progression is mediated via deposition of desmoplasia or fibrosis as well as infiltration of immune cells that drive tumour progression.

Is there a correlation between age and obesity and cancer?

Cancer normally appears at later ages, in older, most forms of cancer, since it’s a disease that takes a long time to develop it will appear very late in a person’s lifetime. In terms of obesity it’s actually so prevalent these days that it happens very early on. We’re already experiencing childhood obesity epidemics as well. So I don’t know if age will have a synergistic impact on this interaction between obesity and cancer but to some extent it correlates with at least cancer.

Does being obese from a young age increase your chances of cancer?

That’s a good question; I think there are some people looking into that. We didn’t explore that, we were more interested in how obesity affects not only tumour progression but response to chemotherapy. But based on our study and other people’s studies it probably will have an impact in cancers that are latent and they take a long time to grow. For instance in pancreatic cancer we know that it’s a cancer that develops very early on so by the time it’s diagnosed it has been there for many years. So probably if you have an obese phenotype when you’re younger it probably will have some impact.

What clinical impact has your research had?

What we found was that in the obese setting there is more inflammation in cancer and that promotes accelerated tumour progression. So we know that in patients if they have excess weight they have a worse prognosis and what we’ve discovered is that that may be explained by increased inflammation and increased fibrosis in tumours. So what we propose is, first, we believe that we should consider using mouse models that reflect patients which means using obese mouse models. Second, we can extract information that is applied to patients. So we found that a number of drugs can be particularly useful in patients that have excess weight. So when we design clinical trials or we attempt to use a new drug we should take into consideration that body weight is important for drug selection.

Are you looking into anything else currently?

We’re actually trying to finish another project in breast cancer. So what I presented here was essentially pancreatic cancer but some of these findings also have an implication in terms of driving breast cancer progression. Breast also has a lot of adipose tissue so we’re studying the interaction between adipose tissue and breast cancer cells and we are finding that in obese patients also there is a worse prognosis and accelerated tumour progression and that’s what we are now exploring.